U.S. Is Seeking To Strip 5,000 Of Citizenship

By ERIC SCHMITT

Published: May 24, 1997

WASHINGTON, May 23—
The Clinton Administration will seek to strip the citizenship of nearly 5,000 immigrants who were wrongly naturalized in an immigration drive last year, Federal officials said today.

Revoking that many citizenships at any given time is without precedent for the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and it poses enormous legal and logistical challenges for the Federal Government. Until now, the agency has never dealt with more than about two dozen revocations a year.

Beginning last fall, Republicans accused the Administration of mounting an election-year campaign to streamline citizenship procedures to allow more than 180,000 immigrants to become citizens before the November elections without having their criminal records fully checked.

As a result of these criticisms, the I.N.S. undertook a review of the nearly 1.1 million people who were granted citizenship from September 1995 to last September to determine how many were wrongfully naturalized.

An audit whose findings were released to Congress today found that 16,400 of the new citizens had a record of at least one felony arrest. Arrest or conviction, by itself, is not grounds for revoking someone's citizenship.

But the audit, which is nearly complete, also found 4,946 cases in which a criminal arrest should have disqualified an applicant or in which an applicant lied about his or her criminal history.

''We believe that we are on firm ground in proceeding on administrative revocations where somebody has factually made a misrepresentation on a felony arrest,'' Assistant Attorney General Stephen Colgate said at a news conference today.

Today's findings mark the latest blow to the beleaguered immigration agency and its Citizenship U.S.A. program. The program was started in late 1995 to address a mounting backlog of citizenship applications, but Republicans contend that it has been hijacked by White House political operatives along the way for electioneering purposes.

Doris M. Meissner, the Commissioner of Immigration and Naturalization, issued a set of sweeping safeguards to prevent immigrants with criminal records from becoming citizens. But an independent review concluded in April that many of the agency's own employees had ignored the directives.

Representative Lamar Smith, a Texas Republican who has been the Administration's most severe critic on the citizenship issue, praised the immigration service today for ''making good progress'' in tracking down the scofflaws.

''The big question is, 'Is the I.N.S. going to be successful in correcting their mistakes, are they going to be successful in denaturalizing these roughly 5,000 individuals who were wrongly made citizens?' '' Mr. Smith said.

In some cases, the offenses may be serious enough, such as a felony conviction for rape or murder, that an individual could have his citizenship revoked and be deported to his native country.

But lying under oath to an immigration examiner is not by itself a deportable offense, and in those circumstances a naturalized citizen would revert to a legal resident alien.

The immigration agency faces enormous hurdles in revoking the citizenship of the immigrants. In the 1995 fiscal year, the latest year for which figures are available, the agency revoked the citizenship of 20 people in procedures that typically took months to complete.

In the past few months, the immigration agency has adopted a simpler revocation process that no longer requires each case to go before a Federal court judge. Under the new system, an immigration administrative officer decides a revocation case; a defendant can appeal the decision to a Federal judge.

Carole Florman, a Justice Department spokeswoman, said the time to process each revocation case would depend on whether an individual contests the process, but could range from days to months.

As to when the nearly 5,000 revocation cases would be completed, Ms. Florman said, ''I have no idea.''

The immigration agency's general counsel, David Martin, is expected to provide to Congress on June 22 an approximate schedule of when the agency thinks it can complete the revocation proceedings, Ms. Florman said.

At that time, the immigration agency is also expected to ask for more money from Congress to hire additional lawyers and clerks to help deal with the sudden mountain of revocation proceedings.

Of the 4,946 problematic cases that the audit identified, 296 of the immigrants were convicted felons and 2,507 had lied about their criminal history and had a felony arrest or conviction that might have disqualified them from citizenship.

The remaining 2,143 will face revocation proceedings because they lied when asked whether they had ever been arrested, but had only minor offenses. If they had told the truth and said yes, their offenses would not have disqualified them or threatened their citizenship.

In addition to the nearly 5,000 immigrants who were wrongfully naturalized, the immigration agency has been trying to determine how many of the 180,000 people whose criminal backgrounds were never properly checked might have been wrongfully naturalized, too.

It is much harder to weed out the wrongfully made citizens in this group because in many cases, their applications were filled out improperly or the fingerprints that must accompany any application were illegible or missing.

So immigration officials, working with specialists from the accounting firm KPMG/Peat Marwick, have gone through a painstaking match of each individual's name against the Federal Bureau of Investigation's criminal data base.

This review turned up 9,100 people who had the same name as someone in the criminal data base. Whether they are one and the same person, and whether their offenses would disqualify them, is still under review.

The auditors are also reviewing the records of 300 newly naturalized citizens who were arrested on misdemeanors, such as prostitution, that could result in the revocation of their citizenship.